BOUSTROPHE

I read the spread palms of the oaks that will outlast me, summer beyond summer. Golden light strikes through emerald type, eliminating it from the transcription of the day, and I feel someone curl alive, ice cold, through some hidden vent, just behind my shoulder. Ice cold and blowing blue into my veins. I feel the spear of my Fall impale my body in this smothered annum-- precursor and kiss-promise of a sap-sweet decline into glacial pools-- the mutual erosion of love and the loved.

Do I bear down and prosecute each difficult moment, full of the blinds and traps of each mewling dullard's obtuse insistences, or should I continue my inversion-- I'll continue Castaneda's fraud-- let the gleaming dog have my arm, then-- frothed mouth of bloody black gums drags me to the places I scattered the bones of my tensegrity harem, lovers true and faithful. "Look. See what you've done. Remember." He glares at me, Dog-Judge. For this I will hang by my neck from strange eclipses, strange crescents, strange gravitational pins-- an executioner troupe of moon-mothers, sickles sharpened by starlight; encandled by grim butchery I'll light their way through the desert. "An it harm none..." Oh but harm me. Harm me so completely, such that nothing remains but some little smoke and ash.

The traitor flips the script on you so quick-- just there, off the road, a pathway into dark-body bushes, where everything cleaves at once to good and evil-- the step off the ledge into ruin; the tires spinning off the crumbling cliff; inertial invective of scorched corpse malignance-- impact-- mudsplash spraying the features of the Enemy, leering in window-mirror reverse-- to wake up from this dream of life and face the Judgment of the Lord, oh woe and calamity, such remorse-- imagine it with me-- such remorse but too, too late. How trivial it is to imagine, after all, don't you think? Everyone always gets what they deserve in the end. Except, they don't.

I'm a spectre, unwelcome in the world in which you exist. One of us should not be here. One of us is wrong-- unnatural. Notice the endless procession of, again, traplike fiends in the shape of persons you know-- have known forever; automata. Machine code, being followed on the tape, backwards and forwards, always. Always playing for attention-- see? See? Dragged along by black dogs and white dogs and forced to howl in unison. This is the only really dangerous thing out there. The rest is just being unlucky, or not. Fatal, terminal, or not.

I'm lonely. I miss you. I miss me.